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Chapter 2 - Speculative Cartography

My general strategy has been to deduce what I could, and then speculate from there, and guess only as a last resort.

To a degree, this is a fool's errand; the very act of trusting what Steve has to say about Dragaera is speculative on my part due to his use of unreliable narrators. Nonetheless, I have attempted to take what he writes (and the map that he shared with me) at face value as much as possible.

A word about attributions:

When I quote from one of Steve's books, it will look like this:

I have refrained from using page numbers, and have instead opted for chapters. I've gone through multiple editions of Steve's books, and the page numbers proved unreliable.

When I quote a person (usually Steven Brust himself, as in this example), the speaker should be made clear in the text around the quote, which will look like this:

Sometimes I'll show the relationship between two points like this:

These observations are always from my map, never the text, and are measured as the jhereg flies (assuming they fly in straight lines).

What I mean by "leagues" and "time" will be explained shortly.

The Planet

I believe Dragaera is the name of the planet based on this passage:

I asked Steve how big the planet is, and he replied,

It orbits its parent star every 17 months, each of which is 17 days in length, for a total year length of 289 days:

Each day is 30 hours in length.

This means there are approximately 8,670 hours in a Dragaeran year, and 8,766 hours in an Earth year.

It appears to have two moons, named Bigmoon and Littlemoon:

Geographical Zones

While I have decided to avoid longitude in this version of the map, I think lines of latitude are still possible (since lines of latitudes are evenly spaced as you go north or south, unlike lines of longitude, which converge on the poles).

The continent upon which the Empire is located is located in the northern hemisphere:

Furthermore, the southern portion of the Empire appears to be in a torrid zone:

Shortly after making this observation, Kytraan gestures towards Dzur Mountain, which is still visible, so I located the Dragaeran equivalent of the Tropic of Cancer just north of Dzur Mountain.

There is a note on Steve's Map that says Burning Island was renamed to Icecliff Island; this suggests it is perpetually covered in ice, which would put it in the arctic zone. On Earth, it is possible for trees to grow north of the arctic circle, but it does not appear to be the norm, so I guessed this meant the Dragaeran equivalent of the Arctic Circle was midway between the Twisted Forest and Burning Island.

I then marked 45 degrees north at the exact midpoint between the Dragaeran Tropic of Cancer and Arctic Circle.

Degrees of latitude are evenly spaced about 69 miles apart on Earth, and since Dragaera is "roughly" the size of the Earth, it follows that each degree of latitude on Dragaera is also about 69 miles apart.

That puts the Dragaeran Tropic of Cancer at 27.5 degrees (compared to 23.4 on the Earth) and the Dragaeran Arctic Circle at 62.4 degrees (compared to 66.6 on the Earth), and indicates an axial tilt of 27.5 degrees, slightly more than that of the Earth.

This means Dragaeran summers and winters are probably more extreme than Earth's in the Temperate and Frigid Zones.

Geographical Zones

Prevailing Winds

I have assumed that the prevailing winds are the same on Dragaera as on Earth; that is, warm air around 30 degrees north moves towards the equator (curving to the west due to the Coriolis force), and to about 60 degrees north (while curving to the east). Cold air at the pole moves toward 60 degrees north while curving to the west:

Prevailing Winds

Note that the actual direction of the wind at any given location will depend on a number of other factors, including the nearby terrain, and will vary from day to day and even hour to hour depending on local weather conditions.

Seasons

We are often given dates in the form "Early Spring" or "Late Winter." Using the 1st day of summer as a base point:

I calculated the 1st day of each season as follows:

From this, I was able to extrapolate the mid-point of each segment of each season as follows:

In other words, if a date is given as "early spring", and there is nothing more accurate to go on, I will translate that date as the 13th day of the year when calculating travel times and the like.

Directions

Where possible, I have treated all directions as exact. That is, "north" means "due north".

However, most places that are referenced more than once do not fit neatly within such narrow definitions, so where needed, I have broadened my definitions of directions as follows:

North means more N than E or W. That is, +/- 45 degrees of due N.

Northeast means more NE than N or E, or +/- 22.5 degrees of due NE.

North by Northeast means more NNE than N or NE, or +/- 11.25 degrees of due NNE.

North by East means more NbE than N or NNE, or +/- 5.625 degrees of due NbE.

Directly North means +/- 5.625 degrees of due North.

Here is a compass rose showing the relationship of all of these directions.

Compass Points

Distribution

There are a number of cases where a location is given as a range of possibilities, not as a single point. In such cases, I have assumed that the point is located in the center of the specified range.

For example, if a city were 300-400 miles from another point, I would assume it was about 350 miles as a starting point.

Similarly, if port B is along the coast between port A and port C, and I think I know where A and C are, I will assume B is midway between the two.

Descriptive Names

I have assumed that descriptive place names are accurate. That is, Southpoint is at the southern point of something, the Great Northwestern Road runs primarily to or in the northwest, the Yendi River twists and turns like a snake, and so forth.

Of course, I cannot rule out that there is a Dragaeran equivalent to Iceland or Greenland out there, but I think that assuming descriptive place names are accurate will help more than it will hinder this enterprise.

The Size of Mountains

Taken together, these two passages suggest that the slopes of Dzur Mountain extends at least 20-30 miles.

It appears that the Broken Mountain has a diameter of around 60 miles, or a radius of about 30 miles, which is very similar to Dzur Mountain.

While there is no indication that there is a single peak between the East and West here, this observation occurs toward the southern end of the Eastern Mountains, when the range is trailing off.

I think these three passages, taken together, suggest that mountains in Dragaera are, on average, between 25 and 30 miles in radius. I'm certain that every peak is unique, but when I have to estimate the size of a mountain (or the distance from its foothills to its peak), I will assume a radius of 25-30 miles.

The Distance Between Peaks

While the above works great for isolated mountains, or from the slopes of mountains to the peak, what about the distance between peaks in a mountain range?

I was unable to find much data on this subject for our planet. A master thesis titled "Landform identification from surface networks" looked at a subset of mountainous regions in Switzerland and found that

That's about 27 miles, which (perhaps coincidentally) is within the same radius as Steve appears to be using.

When there are mountain peaks that border each other, but specific distances between them are not given, I've assumed the peaks are about 25-30 miles apart.

In a few places, I have utilized a 25-mile hexagonal grid to help locate geographic features that are next to each other but whose precise distances are not given.

Miles in a League

Dragaerans and Easterners appear to measure leagues differently:

And Dragaerans have at least two types of leagues in use:

Another example of different leagues is this claim:

On Steve's Map, Newmarket is 1,033 miles from Dragaera City, so this type of league would be equal to about 17 miles.

Finally, as I'll discuss later in the chapter on Newmarket (please see that chapter for full details), Lars claims they've been traveling at 5 leagues a day, and at the point he says this, they appear to have traveled about 650 miles in 15 days or so, which works out to 43 miles a day, which would make Lars' leagues equal to about 9 miles each.

Unless explicitly stated otherwise, I have assumed there are 3 miles per league (the same way we measure statute leagues).

Measuring Distance by Time

Sometimes the distance between two points is stated in hours or days rather than miles or leagues.

The first consideration that must be made is how to relate hours to days when it comes to traveling. I have assumed that no more than 18 hours a day will be spent traveling in most cases, based on this passage:

Here are all the references I could find to how many miles one might travel in a day. I have ignored as atypical those travel times made via the post system, as they appear to be much, much faster than any other form of travel short of teleportation.

The average travel time is 51.97 miles per day, and the median travel time is 54.0; for convenience, I rounded these figures to 50.

When distance is stated as a function of time, and there is no more specific way of determining the actual distance, I have assumed that the average traveler goes 50 miles in a day and 3 miles in an hour.

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